The Search For What You Want

‘Giving search users what they want not what they’re asking for‘, is the name of a guest post written by Seth Early and Jeannine Bartlett for Fierce Content Management. The message is that we need to think of a broader concept of findability because the issues associated with current search functions are affecting “site search effectiveness”. The search box used on most sites provides a good compliment to the search if a users can’t find what they are looking for through navigation, but should not be the only search option available. Although the option to refine your search in some way is necessary, having to move to another page to perform an advanced search is mentioned as another issue. User’s don’t generally like doing this and search terms can in general be quite ambiguous and thus not return very relevant, if any, results….even if the user typed in what they wanted to find.